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“Too many went too far with their reviews … we are reviewing who
gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom … Bad
scores are fine. Venom filled reviews … that’s completely
different.”

That’s the combination of two separate Tweets from The Redner
Group, the Public Relations agency that’s been working to bring
news of Duke
Nukem Forever to the gaming press recently.

Up until this Twitter outburst,
which has since been deleted, Jim Redner from the PR agency has
been consistently friendly and polite in all exchanges.

The combination of a low Metacritic rating, which has been
sitting in the 50s since coverage started pouring in, and some of
the “venom” in bad reviews seems to have pushed the rep a little
too far.

Redner threatened that game review sites that “went too far” in
their Duke NukemForever reviews were
potentially heading towards a blacklisting.

What is blacklisting? It’s pretty obvious, I suppose, but it
happens more often than you’d think.

When press covers a game in an unfavorable way, companies may
elect to blacklist that outlet from future product samples and
review materials.

I’m speaking from experience on this one. While I’ll never tell
which publisher blacklisted the publication I was working for
(not TechnoBuffalo), I will say that they did so because of a
poor score and how and it affected their Metacritic rating.

The company actually owned up to the fact that our score hindered
them from hitting a certain point in order to earn a fiscal bonus
from their superiors.

We were blacklisted as a site and have been shorted on review
copies from this particular company since then.

The gaming coverage industry can be a dirty, ugly business. As
writers, there’s a lot of pressure to make PR firms happy in the
process of covering their product. Being blacklisted means a huge
loss in site traffic once review embargoes lift. You don’t have
the game, you can’t review the game, you can’t partake in the day
one festivities.

With the good sites, moral obligations typically win out over
strained relationships with PR reps. And the best PR reps are
often more than understanding of any form of coverage. Typically,
most PR reps fall into the good category.

On a positive note, I can speak to a peer and his relationship
with an agency. He wrote a bad review for a game that was
swimming in low scores.

We saw the rep that sent us the game at a convention a few months
after said review was published.

He actually came to us and had a good laugh about it. Was he
frustrated with the game’s reception? Absolutely. But he made
sure to share that he understood that we were just doing our jobs
in coverage. I respect that particular rep and his firm a lot
more because of that exchange.

Redner has since apologized for his outburst. How that will
affect his relationship with publishers and press remains to be
seen.

The real losers here are consumers of review coverage. I
recognize that it’s become hard to trust which sites are writing
reviews properly, and which are writing reviews to please public
relations firms.

The only thing I can say is, “good luck.” Always read more than
one review. Never judge a game by its Metacritic rating alone.
Reviews are an exceptionally useful tool, just make sure you
ingest them in bulk to understand a game. Not every site writes
good reviews to receive favorable treatment from PR companies,
remember that.